A while back I wrote that Apple should do something similar to the announced Palm Foleo. Although the thought of a Foleo-like device by Apple might have sounded like a good plan, a Palm Foleo seems to have had less than a warm welcome. So, today Palm announced that the Foleo is dead, mainly because they actually felt it would be better to focus on their battle with actual cool products like the iPhone and those HTC phones. All and all it will probably be a better plan anyway.

Bye bye Foleo, we will miss you.

Palm announced a new device today with the name Foleo and I think it might be one of the first good things Palm has created in years. It is a “small mobile companion”, that targets user with the need for more in a phone and less in a laptop. The device reminds me of something I have been thinking about recently, as I was thinking of what next device Apple had to make for me.

Ever since I switched from a Windows desktop to a Mac laptop, I have been thinking of how this changed my lifestyle. I used to have a PC at home, and when I traveled around I actually used to use other people’s PC to remote desktop to my own PC at home. Although easy, this method depended on my internet connection at home and the internet/workstation availability at the location I traveled to. I love the fact that I now have a laptop with me at all time that has my data (recently upgraded to 160GB) and settings. But I think there is a market for a different device.

And this is where the Palm Foleo comes in. The Foleo offers a real companion to you mobile phone, and has a nice 10.2 inch screen and a full size keyboard. The targeted market for this device is clearly people who really want to send emails and browse, but don’t like telephone interfaces. I admit, even with my N95 I only use the Wi-Fi to search for hotspots, and once located I get my MacBook out of my bag. With the amount of people carrying around fat mobiles with horrible interfaces, and others carrying around heavy laptops in order to access their email, I started thinking of a product that would be far easier.

Imagine that Apple would make a device like the Folio in the form of a “MacBook Mini”, allowing you to easily access your data on your iPhone and syncing at home with your nice iMac. I think a Folio-like device would do for on the road as I never need a dvd/cd drive, could really do with a solid state hard drive, and would really not mind a smaller screen. There are some hints that Apple is going in the direction of an even smaller MacBook, as many PowerBook 12″ users haven’t switched yet because they are missing an ultra-portable model.

I hope that Apple understands the trend of our society and uses its powerful experience in syncing to make the world a better place.

I already did a small review of the new Nokia N95 last week, but today I will be going into some more detail about what makes the N95 “tick”. The first day I had my N95, I played around trying to get Jaiku working over GPRS, and then I installed Fring to be able to use Skype over the Wifi. Obviously all this tinkering quickly drained the battery so here is a more detailed overview of “what computers have become”.

Battery Life (+)

One complaint of some reviewers is the battery life of the N95, but both I and another N95 owner noticed that this is probably only an issue in the first week because this is when you are playing around with all the functions. Once you start using the phone as a phone, and only occasionally use the display/video/GPS/wifi capabilities, the battery life is actually very acceptable. For me, even when using a lot of wifi, the battery life ranges from 1 to 1.5 days .

GPS (+/-)

The built-in GPS receiver is what sets the N95 apart from the other Nokia N-series phones. Unfortunately the GPS receiver is of really bad quality, and the antenna is located in the keypad, so for reception you will have to slide open the screen. In the first days I couldn’t manage to get a fix, but I recently noticed that if you stand still under a blue sky, it is able to make a fix on your position within a minute or two. This isn’t quite quick enough to solve my GPS issue, but it is fun.

Amazingly though, once you do have a fix, it really manages to keep track of your position. Even in places (half inside a building for example) where you would not get an initial fix at all. I did notice some inaccuracy here and there but in the end it does it’s job. The software provided is pretty detailed and uses internet (wifi, GPRS, UMTS or other) to download your maps. I manually zoomed in to the London area once and that was enough to never again run out of cached maps. A nice addition is the built-in search engine for finding interesting places (hotels, restaurants, etc) in your current area.

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